Company Screenings

What problems do ethical screenings solve?

Does your organisation struggle to find the time and resources to meet your ethical procurement policy? Ethical Consumer has 35+ years experience in this area and can lift that burden from your team. Our ethical screenings service ensures:

• Your organisation’s reputation is in safe hands
• Your suppliers, partners or funders align with your organisation’s ethical and environmental criteria and fit your organisation’s unique values

Our ethical screenings inform organisations of potential reputational risks from prospective donors, service providers and partners. We provide in-depth research that gives organisations everything they need to make informed decisions about their current and future partnerships in their procurement, sponsorship and donor relations departments.

Screenings services and projects

Our corporate screenings cover:

• Procurement
• Onboarding
• Checks on fund/grant recipients or donors
• Due diligence

Organisations that benefit from our ethical screenings include large non-governmental organisations such as Amnesty International, British Council and NUS, alongside smaller non-profits and charities.

Recent screenings projects include:

• Screening contractors for a global human rights NGO
• Screening bidders of commercial tenders for a national union
• Screening prospective recipients of funds for an international grant giving organisation

Please see our screenings framework below. Our system is adaptable to suit your needs and to focus on the issues you care about most.

Research sources 

An ethical screening draws together information from a range of sources, including:

• Data from 25 years of research in our Corporate Research Database, with daily updates by our research team. Screenings clients can also subscribe to the database to gain access to information on thousands of companies and latest ratings.
• Company ownership checks – who really owns your prospective funder or partner? Who are its majority and minority shareholders? Our research ensures you know who you are really dealing with.
• Press search of mainstream, business and campaign group sources to highlight any potential negative stories your organisation should be aware of. 

Our ethical stance on Artificial Intelligence (AI)

We keep a close eye on AI.

We want your organisation to make informed ethical choices that align with your values and to ensure your reputational protection. Importantly, we want you to receive accurate, transparent information.

That’s why our screening reports contain only original research, written by our dedicated researchers with extensive experience in rating the ethics of companies and organisations.

We do not use AI-generated text in our work, or AI tools in our research. We are aware of the potential of AI, and have established a working group within our organisation to explore future possibilities and to keep up-to-date with emerging ethical issues associated with AI.

We have found AI introduces inaccuracies and omissions, which present an ethical risk. While other providers rely heavily on AI technologies at the expense of accuracy and insight, Ethical Consumer provides a bespoke service with approachable and responsive human researchers who have an in-depth knowledge of reputational and financial risks.

Our research remains human-powered, and we believe this human oversight throughout the screenings process is the safest way to conduct due diligence and reputational risk checks.

See Ethical Consumer's AI policy.

Testimonials

Ethical Consumer has 35+ years of experience delivering screenings services and technologies to a broad range of NGOs and private sector organisations.

As market-leaders in ethical due diligence, we have developed a core methodology for rating organisations that is tailored to meet the specific needs of our clients. These include global charities, not-for-profit organisations and businesses.

Here’s what they say about us:

We have developed a great partnership with Ethical Consumer – their approach has a sound methodology and their corporate screenings are robust and thorough. They don’t just tell us what we would like to hear, but provide evidence and reason for their conclusions. 

Ms Gizela Erasmus, Senior Donor Compliance Specialist, International Development Policy and Practice, ActionAid UK

I found my contacts at Ethical Consumer to be unfailingly helpful and cooperative, in particular if I presented them with an urgent request. The reports were always clear, impressively detailed, well-referenced and utterly impartial.

Ben Harris, Business Planning and Performance Analyst, Cultural Engagement, British Council

We found them to be exceptionally responsive and thorough in our discussions with them and in helping us establish what types of searches were available to us and would be applicable for our needs. Their output report was very detailed, completely clear and totally fit for the purpose for which it was intended. It enabled us to make genuinely informed decisions on our potential engagements with external entities knowing that we had as much information that was publicly available from an ethical standpoint.

Tarenn Galesloot, Head of Relocation and Workplace, Amnesty International UK

Prices and ordering

Current prices

Prices start at £150 for a mini screening, and £550 for a standard screening (10 day lead time).

If we do not rate an issue or do a search that you require in your report, we can work with you to develop a bespoke search or rating which we can include in our screenings report for you.

We also offer faster 3 or 5 day turnaround times (subject to our capacity).

Contact us at screenings@ethicalconsumer.org for our full price list.

Bespoke pricing

We work with our clients to provide the best service within their price range.

Examples of how we work with clients include:
 

Mini screenings

A paired down version of a screening report, most suitable for those wanting to narrow down lists of companies as part of a tendering process for example. We provide brief ownership information, state if the company has any outstanding policies or practices for its sector, and indicate whether the company poses a reputational risk based on a criticism search. It is designed to give a quick indication as to the suitability of the company, but does not provide any in-depth research or detail to pick up finer points of reputational risk, and does not include any ratings or an Ethiscore. 

Hourly rates

We have agreements with some clients to only spend a certain amount of time on a report, e.g. a cap of 6 hours per report. We then do as much research on that company as we can in that amount of time. We decide with the client what the priority searches and ratings are, and do those first. For larger organisations that are being screened, this may mean certain ratings or risk searches are missed out. However, a cap on hours can work well for organisations that have a limited budget and know exactly what priorities they need out of a screenings report.

Retainer service

We work with some organisations using a retainer system, wherein they pay us a lump sum retainer and each time a screening report is produced, it comes out of the retainer. This works well for clients who have a budget set aside for procurement or due diligence checks. Reports can be delivered throughout the year as and when needed, or we can create a schedule to deliver reports in batches.

Contracts

We have worked with many of our clients for years, and we value long term relationships. For our longstanding clients, we prefer to establish a contract to inform how we will work together. For clients who know approximately how many reports they want to order per month or year, this helps us to prioritise our workload to ensure we can cater to your demands.

We appreciate loyalty, and can usually provide favourable terms for those clients who guarantee us steady orders.